About Me

I have a degree in radiological medical physics, a wonderful husband, an awesome little boy and a darling foster daughter. I've finished my first novel (a time-travel romance set in Scotland), revised the heck out of it, and am currently querying agents.

Slate Article: Time-Traveling for Dummies

In which a physicist lays out some ground rules for the use of time-travel in fiction.

A couple favorite quotes from the Slate article:

Quantum randomness must obey well-established laws, and Novikov showed that the probability of producing a different future with a time machine was zero. To put it more simply: You cannot alter history in any way that changes it from what it always was.

Matched with (my character) Teresa's words:"Ye cannae change the past, lass. Ye can only do what ye have already done!"

And:

But if you've already seen what your destiny is, then the future is already written. Making that self-consistent future play out is one of the great challenges of time-travel fiction.

Yes, I can tell you: it is!

I read the article with increasing glee, as I had constructed my own time-travel "rules" based on my own background as a physicist, and was very happy to see that I seem to have gotten it "right"...

To wit: my 2.5-year-old posts on the topic in my own book establish that Elspeth is moving within one, self-consistent universe, her "time machine" is space-time itself, so she can travel back beyond her own birth, her own supposedly "free will" actions to change history actually result in the occurrence as she recalls it, etc. (No spoilers here! Not really.)

No comments:

Alec & Elspeth

One Highland Night

When a meteoritic crystal opens a wormhole on the grounds of ruined Kilchurn Castle in the Scottish Highlands, trapping American physicist Elizabeth Martin over 300 years in the past, her cheating ex-fiancé becomes the least of her worries. Pursued by the politically avaricious Earl of Breadalbane, who wants to use her “Sight” to further his consolidation of power, her only choice is to take refuge with an outlaw clan—a temporary measure until she can find a way to return to her own time.

That’s the plan, at least, until she finds in Alec MacGregor, her handsome protector, a love worth giving up everything she’s ever known.

But it is the late seventeenth century, and while Scotland is torn by the power struggles between supporters of the exiled King James and the English who would seek to rule them, she and Alec are swept into the intrigues of Earls and Kings, and events that could take their lives…or separate them forever.